We’re coming upon the tribunal when the horn sounds, loud and sharp, two times over. All the trollis slow at its call.
Two times over. Monster attack.
Unach and I bolt down the lane, hurrying to the dock. Others quicken their steps, rushing to their designated stations to wait out the attack. I think of the leckers’ prior breach and push my legs faster.
Two slayers, Kub and Troff, have already set up at the dock when we arrive, Troff holding a rope that must lead to Kesta, already on the city’s exterior.
“Hurry!” Kub says.
Troff blurts at me, “I can hold two!”
We rush for the trunk of harnesses. Unach grabs one and shoves her legs into it. I help her buckle and adjust.
Troff says, “It’s a spreener. A big one. Came up to check out the waterworks—” He grunts and pulls back on the rope as it changes directions.
Unach fastens a rope to her harness before throwing the other end to Kub. I untangle my own small harness, which I usually shove in the bottom right corner of the trunk for easy finding. Once Unach’s rope coils up through the pulleys, she climbs out.
I hear her curse at the same time the horn blows again, loud and teeth shaking.
Seconds later I understand why, after a stip! stip! stip! of sharp legs shakes the rock and an immense shadow falls over the dock, punctuated by half a dozen acidic eyes.
My breath dissolves. The spreener spider is massive, its exoskeleton hard and faceted as a carved gem, its beak gleaming, sufficiently large to take a trollis—or a human—in a single bite. Kub and Troff both jerk back, retreating, ropes under their arms. In unison they reach for the heavy swords on their belts. My heart pulses hard and heavy. Chills spiral down my arm.
I’ve never been this close to a monster, even the leckers.
The spreener hisses, revealing two sets of slimy fangs.
Peering into its gaping mouth, I shove my fear down its gullet.
But the spreener doesn’t react as the leckers did. It starts, it rears, and it fights. The entire dock quakes as it lunges, legs grappling with the stone, beak snapping for me. I rush for the chest of swords, hardly able to keep my balance on the shaking floor. Each chomp clacks louder than thunder and echoes against the wall as if an invisible army surrounds us.
Troff slashes at its armor with his sword, striking a joint. The spreener’s many eyes shift as it wheels around to face him. In doing so, its curling legs sweep out and strike me in the side, whipping me across the dock floor and out—
I’m falling.
Wild fear bursts through my body, cold and slick and sharp. Everything slows as terror spurs my brain to work faster.
My harness isn’t buckled.
I don’t have a rope.
The dock looms above me. The canyon below.
I scramble, limbs flying. My nails scrape across the stony side of the city as I plummet, searching for a handle, but there aren’t any. The rock skims my knee, rips up my hands—
I catch a sliver of a ledge and cling to it with all the strength in my right hand, crying out when my weight jerks on my shoulder. A shout echoes above me. I barely register it as Unach as I try to find another handhold, but there’s no space for another grip. My feet dangle. I flail, my left hand glazing over too-smooth rock. I’m holding myself up by just four fingers now.
And I’m slipping.
“Help!” My pulse thumps like a war drum. I can barely hear the commotion over it. Unach hangs thirty feet above me, sword drawn, torn between the spreener and me. Kesta hangs on the other side of the dock, wide eyed.
Fight or flee.
The spreener fights.
Gritting my teeth, digging in my nails, I glare at the spreener’s backside and push the mounting fear out of me, striking it again. As before, it spins and seeks me out, hissing, saliva raining from its beak, bits of broken stone tumbling down.
But it has neglected Kub and Troff. I hear two loud cracks, and the spreener screams, a horrible, grating sound that rattles my eardrums and pierces my brain. The spreener falls off the dock, green ooze spraying from two severed hind legs. It falls into the canyon, but its slime dribbles down the side of the city and toward me. I grit my teeth as the hot ooze splatters my cramping hand. I lose a few millimeters.
“I’m slipping!” I scream. There is no way in the gods’ dry world that I will survive this fall.
“Hang on!” Kesta shouts, working her way down, handhold by handhold.
Again I try to lift my free hand, higher, higher, but there are no dips or crags to fit even a single finger into.
“I’m falling!” I cry. Of all the ways I have pictured myself dying, it was never this.